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SL-mediated tinysex

August 21st, 2006 (Visited 5142 times) Tags:

No, not the ordinary sort, I mean with hardware.

Stroker was followed by mad scientist inventor qDot Bunnyhug, who proceeded to demonstrate a mini-revolution in peripheral hacks for the horny. Inspired by Jane Pinckard, who famously used the Trance Vibrator from the PS2 music game Rez as a, well, actual vibrator, Bunnyhug showed how he’d managed to wire a Trance Vibrator to a laptop running Second Life, then scripted it to respond when an avatar touched a giant green vibrator in Second Life. Between fits of giggles and a suspenseful pause, Bunnyhug’s avatar touched the virtual vibrator–and lo, the physical Trance Vibrator on the other computer whirred to life. (And verily, a whole wealth MMO-to-real world interaction was revealed.) For good measure, qDot held the Trance Vibrator up to the mic, so the whole crazily cheering audience could hear the buzzing– and when he was through, fired up a cigarette. Keep an eye on qDot’s site, where he plans to run a video of the event, and provide schematics for creating a SL-to-vibrator interface of your own. (”All completely open source,” he added proudly. “There should be no DRM to your fucking!”)

Also, they now say they have 536,000 registered users.

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SL-mediated tinysex on Raph Koster - MMOz wrote on August 21st, 2006 at 2:03 pm:

[...] SL-mediated tinysex on Raph Koster SL-mediated tinysex on Raph Koster No, not the ordinary sort, I mean with hardware. Feature: Unconventional Life – Kotaku Stroker was followed by mad scientist inventor qDot Bunnyhug, who proceeded to demonstrate a mini-revolution in peripheral hacks for the horny. Inspired by Jane Pinckard, who famously used the Trance Vibrator from the PS2 music game Rez as a, well, actual vibrator, Bunnyhug [...] via Raph Koster [...]

Faith wrote on August 21st, 2006 at 2:17 pm:

[...] Comments [...]

raccaldin36: Priceless wrote on August 21st, 2006 at 9:35 pm:

[...] out of the technology Vibrator Dude realized? Like, I don’t know… heart surgery. *duck*(Post a new comment) Log in now.(Create account, or useOpenID) [...]

Morgan Ramsay said on August 21st, 2006 at 12:40 pm:

Doing research for your venture?

David said on August 21st, 2006 at 12:45 pm:

I don’t know if the world is quite ready for that level of virtual reality.

csven said on August 21st, 2006 at 12:55 pm:

qDot is just doing what many others have been thinking. Good for him.

If I were into it, I’d volunteer to do the industrial design for a line of limited edition… toys. I considered making that offer last year. But sculpting penis’ in CAD just isn’t at the top of my list of things to do atm.

Allen Sligar said on August 21st, 2006 at 1:13 pm:

“No matter where you go”

qDot Bunnyhug said on August 21st, 2006 at 2:44 pm:

qDot is just doing what many others have been thinking.

No. Really, you have no idea.

Every time I give this talk, people come up and start dumping their deepest, darkest, computer sex secrets to me.

“You know, I had this idea 3 years ago, except the way I did it was…”

*cringe*

Prokofy Neva said on August 21st, 2006 at 4:28 pm:

qDot, can you confirm or deny that you are also Cube Linden?

csven said on August 21st, 2006 at 9:43 pm:

“Every time I give this talk, people come up and start dumping their deepest, darkest, computer sex secrets to me.”

Sorry to hear that. I certainly wouldn’t want to know the details of someone else’s *cough* quality time *cough* with their Dell.

IQpierce said on August 22nd, 2006 at 7:38 am:

Are you kidding, the hardware for this came out back in 1999: http://www.fu-fme.com/

Matt Mihaly said on August 22nd, 2006 at 7:46 am:

Raph wrote:

Also, they now say they have 536,000 registered users.

Our -text MUDs- have more than that, but it’s such a meaningless number that we don’t tout it. You of all people know how little registered users means in a free-to-play-game. Repeating these kind of PR-driven statistics only encourages the media to confuse registered users with actual, active users.

–matt

Raph said on August 22nd, 2006 at 8:04 am:

I’ve ranted about using registered users a a metric before, Matt. But it seems to be the only figure they give out.

Matt Mihaly said on August 22nd, 2006 at 8:25 am:

Nod, I know you know! There’s a reason they only give those figures out, I suspect.

qDot Bunnyhug said on August 22nd, 2006 at 10:10 am:

Video of the talk is now available.

http://distro.nonpolynomial.com/movies/qdotslcc.avi

Allen Sligar said on August 22nd, 2006 at 10:54 am:

Off topic:

Differentiation as far as I know is along the lines of:
Registered
Paying
Active

Whats being asked and how its being asked is important when capturing this data. Just as what the utility of the data is important when picking a measure. Meaning, if you want gross revenue historically, you want paying users (over time), if you want to measure player base interactivity then you want Actives (over time). In a free to DL and Free to play game registered users therefore means little. In case one you might be concerned with declining revenue, In case two you might be concerend with declining player base (and why). In case three you just might want a broad measure of popularity.

Unfortunately, company’s only engage in contests of popularity…..thats two bad, players, academics, business, developers want to generally know a bit more than who’s popular, they want to know why…

Should you really have to rely on the proprietor to tell you how much people love the product? Hmmm I dont think so

I’ve assumed an initial 20-25% capture rate for SL Primium accounts, just assessing the game in the last 2 weeks, controling for annual loss rates and its high barrier to entry for long term residence, I guesstimated around 78-108k paying recurring accounts.

qDot-

I um…wow I’m not sure if thats super funny or I should feel really scared for you. Although this gives a whole new meaning to “intel inside”…..

damijin said on August 22nd, 2006 at 11:25 am:

Although this gives a whole new meaning to “intel inside”…..

Oh the mental images.

Andy Havens said on August 22nd, 2006 at 1:46 pm:

I don’t know what bugs me more… when talk of anything else turns into talk of sex, or when talk of sex turns into an argument over the size of SL’s user base… ; )

The official term for this stuff is “teledildonics” or “cyberdildonics.” Regina Lynn at Wired has been writing about it for years. For a peek at some of the most… er… popular of the devices, see tiny nibble’s review of same (NSFW).

chabuhi said on August 22nd, 2006 at 3:35 pm:

I know a lot of worthwhile things must happen in SL. Heck, I’ve been witness to some of those things. Mostly, though, I’ve been witness to pretty much nothing but porn in SL.

I’m not bashing sex or porn, but it’s kinda sad to me that the creativity always seems to end there, for the most part. Kind of have to admire the R/VR crossover here, though.

I wonder if my SL Roomba could somehow control my RL Roomba … that would be something. Wouldn’t get my rocks off, but at least it would be aiming a little higher (or maybe I should say “raising the bar”).

csven said on August 22nd, 2006 at 4:03 pm:

“But it seems to be the only figure they give out.”

No it isn’t. The front page lists Registered, Active last 60 days, and Currently Logged. Active last 60 is about half the registered iirc. I’m unsure if they publish Pay vs Free accounts. Not sure that it really matters though. Plenty of Pay accounts have downgraded by still log in regularly.

“I wonder if my SL Roomba could somehow control my RL Roomba … that would be something.”

Guys over at Make: might have done this by now. Downloading SL code from virtual versions into RW robots was discussed. There have already been people controlling their home via SL (mostly lights being turned off and on).

Raph said on August 22nd, 2006 at 4:11 pm:

Goes to show how long it’s been since I went to the front page of the SL site!

250k in trailing 60 days. Pity it’s not trailing 30 days, because then we could compare it more directly to subscription bases for other games.

Michael Chui said on August 22nd, 2006 at 5:13 pm:

or when talk of sex turns into an argument over the size of SL’s user base…

Mine is bigger than yours!

csven said on August 22nd, 2006 at 8:20 pm:

“Pity it’s not trailing 30 days, because then we could compare it more directly to subscription bases for other games.”

I don’t think those are subscriptions. Those are just avatars; nothing about whether they pay a monthly to have land. Quite a few people dropped the monthly when SL went free and just rent the land now. It’d be an apples and oranges comparison. The money is less about the numbers and more about the landholders.

Raph said on August 22nd, 2006 at 10:18 pm:

Active users and subscriptions correspond pretty closely, usually — within a fairly typical margin, at any rate. I realize it doesn’t help in terms of “subs” but it does help in terms of assessing a world’s population.

Anyone know whether SL has a high or low incidence of alts?

csven said on August 23rd, 2006 at 7:17 am:

“Active users and subscriptions correspond pretty closely, usually”

Don’t know if that would apply here. For example, a big chunk of change going to LL comes from Anshe since she’s such a large landholder (continent holder). Anshe of course rents property on her sims and pays her fees to LL based on that income. Land ownership is tiered so she effectively gets a volume discount. She passes some of the savings on to renters, as do other landowners (which is why many people opted out of monthly premiums). But here she is – one subscription – handling a very very large number of customers who are not monthly subscribers. The numbers don’t account for how much this one subscription contributes to LL coffers.

Thing is, I have to imagine there’s tug of war between LL’s fees for that land (which she discounts to compete with other landowners) and the need to turn a sufficient profit to pay overhead and continue growing. We’re aware she hires people in China to help manage things and that helps. But Anshe has always been involved in other businesses too, and so she’s also likely to be raking in some profit that LL doesn’t touch (unless of course they’re making money on Linden conversions – which iirc they said they weren’t; transaction fees only). So what you have is one person contributing a lot of money to LL, recouping most from land rental and some from in-world businesses… none of which registers as “subscription”.

Consequently, I’m not sure the correspondence holds. I’d venture Prok could provide a much better analysis and correct me on some of this. But I don’t believe it’s prudent to make the assumption that the numbers are worth much more than a metric to entice outsiders (including RW companies) into SL.

Prokofy Neva said on August 23rd, 2006 at 2:10 pm:

>But here she is – one subscription – handling a very very large number of customers who are not monthly subscribers.

csven, your analysis here seems to hinge on the idea that a “subscription” is only the recurring $9.95 monthly, $22.95 quarterly, or $72 annual fee, or recurring tier fees which are separate.

But in the Linden universe, “a subscription” is any registered account. You can get a free subscription. Until June 2006, these free accounts requiring no monthly fee still came with $50 “stipend” per week, and that $50 appears every week, so there’s $200 per subscription. Thus if the data base is structured to give out $200 L each month, it understands these as monthy subscriptions.

A free account today with no $50 post June still counts as a “subscription” AFAIK, looking at the way the templte is set up.

But this is exactly why, every time this subject comes up, I call on the Lindens to tell us the number of *premium* accounts, i.e. accounts with paid monthly subscription fees in the “regular” sense it is understood, and how many of these elect to have tier above the free 512 level. That figure, which I don’t believe to be more than say, 50,000 people tops, and probably a lot less, is growing, but not at the rate imagined, and if anything, precisely due to the island rentals phenomenon, is declining for those who “tier down” to go and rent on an island where they think the quality of life will be better, or for those who merely bought the account to have stipends — it’s now pointless to farm accounts for their free Lindens, as these now can simply be purchased for $6.00 US a month from the LindEx rather than paying $9.95 US.

Also, I think it would be important to know whether teledildonics is a fashion and entertainment and business being promoted by a resident not tied to LL, or who is a Lindesident, i.e. a former resident who became a Linden and now works for Linden Lab. I think when people do highly visible promotional activities like this that are staged to appear as if there is all this innovation from the residents, it’s important for the media and the public to ask whether they are merely Lindens behind their flashy alt or original main avatar.

csven said on August 23rd, 2006 at 6:06 pm:

“csven, your analysis here seems to hinge on the idea that a “subscription” is only the recurring $9.95 monthly, $22.95 quarterly, or $72 annual fee, or recurring tier fees which are separate.”

True. I was using the term in the standard monthly-fee-game sense as opposed to the Linden anything-goes sense based on the idea that an Active user is someone who has paid and wants to get their money’s worth for the month. Anymore I can imagine there are plenty of people who don’t pay make stuff, sell it, and use the Lindens to pay rent to a Premium member.

SL-mediated tinysex

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